But the right amount of focus probably isn’t “zero, ever”,
I agree! And I’m not saying that anyone should spend zero amount of focus on the question. Sometimes it is a relevant question to be thinking about.
But just as the right amount of focus probably isn’t zero ever, the right amount of focus is probably also not “keep obsessing over it all the time”. As you said, it’s possible to focus too much on it. What I’m describing is a shift where it becomes possible to drop the question in the kinds of situations where it isn’t useful, as opposed to being compelled to constantly run a (rather stressful) analysis about it, regardless of whether that’s going to produce any useful information or not.
I agree (and I expect the person who originally asked this question to agree) that you can know what other people think about you on some level. With the experience that I call “being secure”, you are content with having a sense of what other people think of you on that kind of a rough level, and also okay with the fact that in most cases you should have reasonably wide error bars on that estimate. With the experience that I call “being insecure”, having reasonably wide error bars does not feel okay, and you are trying to get a much more narrow estimate than is usually realistic to extract from the available data, with the general consequence that you become oversensitive to noise.
I agree! And I’m not saying that anyone should spend zero amount of focus on the question. Sometimes it is a relevant question to be thinking about.
But just as the right amount of focus probably isn’t zero ever, the right amount of focus is probably also not “keep obsessing over it all the time”. As you said, it’s possible to focus too much on it. What I’m describing is a shift where it becomes possible to drop the question in the kinds of situations where it isn’t useful, as opposed to being compelled to constantly run a (rather stressful) analysis about it, regardless of whether that’s going to produce any useful information or not.
I agree (and I expect the person who originally asked this question to agree) that you can know what other people think about you on some level. With the experience that I call “being secure”, you are content with having a sense of what other people think of you on that kind of a rough level, and also okay with the fact that in most cases you should have reasonably wide error bars on that estimate. With the experience that I call “being insecure”, having reasonably wide error bars does not feel okay, and you are trying to get a much more narrow estimate than is usually realistic to extract from the available data, with the general consequence that you become oversensitive to noise.